


To New Lovers

by prettypoetic



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-18 17:31:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16521554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettypoetic/pseuds/prettypoetic





	To New Lovers

Kill your darlings, your crushes, your juvenile metaphysics. None of them belong on the page.  
— Kill Your Darlings

There was a girl sitting across Theo in the public library, and this girl was plain until she smiled. He knew, in the absurd parts of him, that she would be even more so in the bedroom—unless she smiled.

He put his book down confidently. — Confident that she would not mind his eyes painting her life with their distant imagination. Or, perhaps, confident that she would paint his. (He hoped, at least, because after all, Theo did not take rejection well.)

Her muliebrity showed in the way she sat and in the way she patted her mouth dry after she would sip her water, and not in the austere simplicity of her vesture. Theo prayed—to any God (whose worship he had halted, whose existence he had disregarded) that would hear—for her to stand up and walk, to give him more colors to paint her life with, and she did. In that moment, for the briefest second, he suspected that God might have been right in front of him, and had heard his heart beat in entreating whispers. It was sad to learn that her gait lacked confidence. The way she held onto her book as she returned (from the fiction section!) was the way a mother held her child. She would hug it to her chest like she was shielding it from the world, from all its detestation of fiction. Or, maybe, and it could have been, that she believed the book was protecting her. Theo tried to read the title, but her bare arms forbade him.

He liked the way she tossed her head to get her red hair (he wondered if they were naturally so) out of her light eyes. She looked so much like someone you would like to draw, or even write a story or poem about. Everything about her was magnetic. Plain, but magnetic.

Theo was certain she had read so many fictional stories that she became a character out of one herself, and gave herself the ability to read minds. Because, as he hoped shamelessly and unafraid that she would smile at her book again, she did—but this time, at him. That was all it took, a smile as long as a couple of seconds, and he swore he could have fallen in love with her forever.

But people like Theo didn’t love. In fact, his heart had never loved before, not even that girl, but now, as he lay awake in the strange comfort of a bed that was not his own, and looked one more time (for confirmation, as it could have easily been a dream too good to be real) to the sleeping boy beside him, he understood—for the first (but not the last) time—what it means to be human. So, gazing at /Liam Dunbar/, Theo let himself remember that day in the library many years ago. He remembered understanding the price of his power.

Such a young boy, and realizing he would—or /could/ never love. But now, as he watched every detail of Liam’s face even in the dimness of the beta’s room, he felt great grief for that young boy he used to be. All those chances he could have missed, those experiences that might have prevented his inhumanity.

Theo, as he brushed some strands of hair out of Liam’s closed eyes, felt even more than he had for that girl—a mere stranger—and he knew, that even for him, it was possible to love, and redamancy didn’t have to be fiction. It was Liam who taught him that—Liam; Theo’s first so many things.

So, finally, for the first time in his life, Theo loved—and he loved wonderfully, and fearlessly, and with everything he had.


End file.
